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Jewish Women On The Road - Joanna Eckstein

Cartoon and photo courtesy of the Seattle Times.

A travel scrapbook held by University of
Washington's Jewish Archives Project contains a 1947 cartoon depicting
Seattle Times travel writer Joanna Eckstein on an escapade. The itinerant
author (looking like Lois Lane) rounds a London street corner and
collides with William Shakespeare, attired in his Elizabethan best.
Shakespeare greets her with a courtly bow and a surprisingly informal,
"I'm Will!" Eckstein, exuding youthful exuberance and a keen sense of
female independence, evidently expects the world to meet her on her terms.
She responds with an enthusiastic "I'm Jo!" A Seattle native born in 1903,
Eckstein claimed to have visited every continent in her lifetime,
beginning with a four-month-long trip to China and Japan in 1936. Her
meticulous scrapbooks and writings chronicle the opening of world travel
to Americans, Jews, and above all women. The cartoon humorously illustrates
four uneasy crossroads of her encounter with Shakespeare—time, place,
gender, and vitality.

"Miss Joanna Eckstein on the shore of the Volga River at Kalinin, Russia"
Courtesy of the Seattle Times

Eckstein offered her readers a fresh perspective on
places and peoples. This was particularly true as she traveled through Europe,
reporting on the progress of post-war recovery. "An afternoon spent walking
through the Tuileries Gardens," she wrote, "showed many improvements since my
last visit. The children no longer are thin and quiet and poorly dressed.
They are fat and pink and noisy and dressed in the high style so long traditional
with the French." In Munich, she reported, "the living accommodations are
clean and comfortable but there are no elevators working, no telephones in
the rooms, bathroom facilities of all kinds frequently break down or fall
apart, push buttons do not work, and much of the building is under reconstruction
to a continual din of hammering and pounding." Beyond her observations of
fashion and domestic settings, Eckstein also offered reports on subjects
ranging from opera's reemergence in Rome, to German resentment over the
territorial division of their country, to her participation in the tenth
conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations in England.

Joanna Eckstein's travels exposed her Seattle readers
to a world that while still far removed from the Pacific Northwest was already
moving closer to their lives. As this vibrant American Jewish woman traveled
the globe, she was able to put a human face on an often confusing post-war
world.

Sources and excerpts for this page were drawn from Joanna
Eckstein's articles as printed in the Seattle Times ("Munich, Short
of Housing Bears Many Scars of War" circa 1950; "Joanna Eckstein Finds Paris
Outwardly Bright and Gay", Sunday, April 30, 1950) as well as Pamela Brown
Lavitt's article "Women of Vision: A Fellow Reports from the Field," from the
Jewish Women's Archive's Re://collections, Vo. III Issue I, Spring
2001.